Title :
Stellar inertial attitude determination for LEO spacecraft
Author :
Wu, Andy ; Hein, Douglas H.
Author_Institution :
Hughes Aircraft Co., El Segundo, CA, USA
Abstract :
This paper describes the normal mode attitude determination algorithm for the low earth orbit (LEO) spacecraft using stellar inertial sensors. Included in the algorithm is a 6-state extended Kalman filter (EKF) which corrects the spacecraft attitude error as well as gyro bias error using celestial observations from star trackers. The detailed derivation of the EKF using a quaternion formulation is given in the paper. Time-domain simulations are presented to show the predicted filter performance which is a function of star density (or number of stars seen), star catalog error, star tracker noise, and gyro noises. Covariance analysis indicates that precision attitude with accuracy better than 12 arc seconds (3 sigma) can be met with the proposed attitude determination and control system hardware components
Keywords :
Kalman filters; aerospace control; aerospace instrumentation; artificial satellites; filtering theory; spatial variables measurement; 6-state extended Kalman filter; EKF; LEO spacecraft; celestial observations; covariance analysis; gyro bias error; gyro noises; low Earth orbit; normal mode attitude determination algorithm; quaternion formulation; star catalog error; star density; star tracker noise; star trackers; stellar inertial attitude determination; stellar inertial sensors; time-domain simulations; Attitude control; Error correction; Filters; Low earth orbit satellites; Position measurement; Predictive models; Quaternions; Sensor phenomena and characterization; Space vehicles; Time domain analysis;
Conference_Titel :
Decision and Control, 1996., Proceedings of the 35th IEEE Conference on
Conference_Location :
Kobe
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-3590-2
DOI :
10.1109/CDC.1996.573637
